It’s that time again. Book number 29 has been published – “The Night Tide”.

It still feels as thrilling as when my first book was published. Some things have changed though. Like the Book Tour.  

Since Covid I’m very over Zoom chats. Or phone interviews when you can’t see the journalist’s face. It’s rare now to do appearances at major bookstores, big Literary Luncheons, or Special Events. 

All media is managed by one of the publisher’s publicists.  I’m lucky to have Clare looking after me. Smart as a whip, strong as an ox, her delicate and gentle appearance hides a will of iron, and ignorance of the word “no”. She smiles and persists until we get a “ well alright then…” 

The Publisher is keen that the Book and I get media exposure apart from all those live phone chats. And social media is not my forte. That means popping into radio stations, chatting to journalists in hotel coffee shops, and if we’re lucky we score some tele. 

Having worked years in television interviewing people on camera, this is familiar territory. However this new book, while a novel, does touch on some sensitive issues for me. Each of my novels comes out of a place …which chooses me and I go there for a month or so and hang around talking to locals soaking up history and the atmosphere and landscape. 

But without going anywhere during lockdown I had to travel in my mind…so I reflected on Pittwater where I grew up as a kid. Which was a difficult sentimental journey.

The TV station decides to take me back there to the places that meant so much to me.

The Church Point ferry service kindly drag the ole ferry “Elvina” out of mothballs for us and the film crew to chug around the bays. I went to school on this ferry every morning. 

They want to take me back to a pivotal place … the home of Dorothea Mackellar who first suggested to a 7 year old girl who “made up stories in her head” that she should “put them in a book so other people can enjoy them.”  

I ask the blokey ferry driver if he knows the people living in my family home… a couple of houses up the bush track from Dorothea Mackellar’s house. 

‘Nah,’ he shrugs. ‘Why doncha just call Dorothea whatshername and ask her if she knows em.’

Sigh. Time marches on.

Di